America’s nuclear-disarmament talks with North Korea are stuck

IT HAS BEEN nearly six months since Donald Trump, America’s president, fantasised about the real-estate potential of North Korea’s pristine beaches at a summit in Singapore with Kim Jong Un, the North’s dictator. Mr Trump promised that Mr Kim would gain all manner of riches if he agreed to give up his nuclear programme. Shortly afterwards, Mr Trump declared in a tweet that his deal with Mr Kim had solved the problem: there was “no longer a Nuclear Threat” from Mr Kim’s regime.

If that upbeat meeting was any guide, North Korea should long ago have made its first strides towards the nuke-free sunlit uplands that Mr Trump envisaged. But not much has happened. North Korea continues to expand its nuclear programme, in violation of several UN resolutions.

Attempts to establish regular working-level talks to flesh out the agreement between Mr Trump and Mr Kim have led nowhere. The latest such meeting, scheduled for earlier this month between Mike Pompeo, America’s secretary of state, and Kim Yong Chol, the North’s nuclear negotiator, was cancelled by the North at the last minute. Rather than trying to turn his country into a beach paradise, Mr Kim seems determined to keep it a poverty-stricken, nuke-wielding “people’s paradise”.

What has gone wrong? America and North Korea disagree about how to interpret the vaguely worded Singapore deal. The text commits North Korea to working towards the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula” in return for American security guarantees. It also requires the two countries to establish “new” relations and build a “lasting and stable peace regime” on the peninsula.

America says this means that North Korea must first give up its nuclear programme, or at least take irreversible steps towards this goal, before receiving anything substantial in return. North Korea says the priority is to establish normal relations. It claims that it has already made several important concessions to show its good will—such as a freeze on nuclear testing that preceded the Singapore summit, its claimed dismantling of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site (which was about to close anyway) and the return of some bones of American soldiers who died in the Korean war of 1950-53. The North says it is now America’s turn to match these gestures, ideally by lifting some sanctions.

The disagreement has been obvious since Mr Pompeo’s first post-Singapore trip to Pyongyang in July, when North Korea rebuffed his attempts to discuss a timeline for dismantling nuclear facilities, or the possibility that the North might provide a list of them to America. The two Koreas, meanwhile, have continued their rapprochement, most notably at a symbolism-rich summit between Mr Kim and Moon Jae-in, the South’s president, in Pyongyang in September. (In line with an accord reached on that occasion, the North has blown up some of its guard posts in the demilitarised zone that divides the two Koreas—see picture). But America and North Korea have been stuck in a rut since June.

The lack of progress in the nuclear talks has begun to hinder the inter-Korean rapprochement, too. Mr Moon is unlikely to achieve his goal to declare an end to the Korean war before the year’s end. And although South Korean peaceniks have staged flower-waving performances in the centre of Seoul to encourage Mr Kim to visit the city, no date for such a trip has been scheduled. Neither have the two sides agreed when they will implement their leaders’ pledge to re-establish inter-Korean rail links. On November 20th Mr Pompeo warned South Korea not to race ahead to improve ties with the North. He said that the process should run in parallel with his own’s country’s efforts to do so.

The North is angry about this. Earlier this month, after America and South Korea said they would set up a group of officials to coordinate their North Korea policies, the North condemned American “interference” in inter-Korean rapprochement. It threatened to return to nuclear- and missile-testing if America did not lift sanctions and help with a peace treaty. In a speech at the UN in September, Ri Yong Ho, the North’s foreign minister, bemoaned America’s “coercive methods, which are lethal to trust-building”.

America may have hoped to “backfill” the Singapore agreement in subsequent working-level talks, says Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. But North Korea has shown little interest in doing so. It has constantly tried to sideline officials such as Mr Pompeo and John Bolton, Mr Trump’s national security adviser, who have been much less upbeat about the North’s intentions than Mr Trump himself. Stephen Biegun, who was appointed as America’s special representative for North Korea in August, has yet to meet his North Korean counterpart. Even Mr Trump has begun to share the scepticism of his advisers.

There are rays of hope. When Mr Pompeo visited Pyongyang in October for the first time since July, he returned with an offer from North Korea to allow inspectors to visit Punggye-ri. Mr Kim has also offered to close down Yongbyon, one of its main nuclear facilities, in return for “corresponding measures” by America (though many experts doubt that Yongbyon, a decades-old facility, still has much value for the North—secret uranium-enrichment programmes are probably far more useful). On November 15th Mike Pence, America’s vice-president, suggested that another summit between Mr Trump and Mr Kim could take place next year, even if the North does not produce a list of its nuclear facilities before then. This appeared to be a hint that America remains willing to try to find a way of breaking the impasse, even though it is unlikely to make big concessions up front.

Mr Trump, it is safe to assume, still wants to be seen as a master dealmaker. So he may decide to meet Mr Kim again and offer some symbolic gestures should Mr Kim agree to let in inspectors. That might enable the two sides to begin working on a more comprehensive deal. Time is not entirely on Mr Kim’s side, given that Mr Trump’s and Mr Moon’s successors are unlikely to be as enthusiastic about engaging with his regime. If Mr Kim does not budge, America and its allies may respond by trying to secure a more rigorous enforcement of sanctions. But it may be difficult to persuade China, through which most of North Korea’s external trade passes, to agree to that. The trade war between China and America is hardly conducive to co-operation. The risk of another nail-biting escalation of tension between America and North Korea is still high.